Table 1 and Figure 1 summarize some important aspects of today's WWW [2], [3], and [4]. Clients have sophisticated display capabilities, and request and receive hyperlinked material from servers. Documents are typically written in HTML, which is a simple subset of SGML, which supports hyperlinked information via URLs [5]---universal resource locators---specifying location of related material. HTML is a dynamic standard and extensive and important new functionality is being added [6]. Servers and client use MIME as the data format, and this can be thought of as an extended email syntax with headers specifying format or method (program to be executed by remote procedure call, RPC) followed by the body of message, which is typically desired data. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard way to add functionality to WebServers with software that typically uses PERL as a convenient rapid prototyping environment offering good access to system resources, files, and document manipulation.
Table 1: Some early WorldWide Web (WWW) technologies and services
Figure 1: A simple representation of the software architecture of the
WWW showing emerging advanced services, as well as the current
technology